Exclusive Interview: A Word With Symphony of War Developer Phil Hamilton (Audio)

August 2, 2022

Gaming Lariat co-founder Jonathan Ridgway spoke to Symphony of War developer Phil Hamilton in an exclusive audio interview about the game’s success and what is next for Dancing Dragon Games.

Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga is a strategy role-playing game (SRPG) released on June 10th, 2022 to overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam. Symphony of War was developed by Dancing Dragon Games and published by Freedom Games. A few weeks after the game’s release we sat down with Dancing Dragon Games co-founder and lead designer on Symphony of War Phil Hamilton as he shares his thoughts on how he’s feeling about the positive reception.

I feel like I’m not digesting it really. I’m just taking it as a mandate to get to work. People are hungry for more content and more updates. We didn’t anticipate this level of reception. I guess, how do I feel? Very grateful, very humbled, but I would say overall the biggest feeling would be that feeling of you thought you were going to be done, but now you have even more work to do. I am an obsessive worker, so that works for me!

Dancing Dragon Games’ partnership with Freedom Games will continue as Phil shared information on how their publisher will continue to support Symphony of War post-release, “They (Freedom Games) will be walking side-by-side with us as we work on a couple of big projects which are coming up. Porting and translations, so we are going to be translating the game (Symphony of War) into French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese.”

Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga was developed over the course of six years. Co-developer Mithran who was the sole programmer on the project built a custom engine in RPG Maker specifically for this project and the studios’ future strategy RPG projects.

RPG Maker is what our programmer knows really really well. We had a lot of constraints because of the engine early on, but we are almost unconstrained at this point now the [custom] engine is in place. Now we will be able to make more content very quickly. RPG Maker is actually very good at that. It’s really really good for just pumping out levels and new character classes because that stuff kind of still uses the vanilla interface that’s built into RPG Maker, so it was kind of like a happy accident, it took too long to make the [custom] engine, but now that it’s there it’s all just gravy. The next game is not going to take us six years, maybe two.

During the interview, Phil also spoke about Symphony of War 2, if they’ll be growing their development team after Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga’s success, the inspiration behind the hit SRPG, and his progression as a game developer from his early years to now and much more!

The Interview Is Available Below